1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to network communications and in particular to addressing systems used by a data processing system. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a system, method and computer program product for maintaining federated name context bindings in a name space.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet, also referred to as an “internetwork”, is a set of computer networks, possibly dissimilar, joined together by means of gateways that handle data transfer and the conversion of messages from a protocol used by the sending network to a protocol used by the receiving network. When capitalized, the term “Internet” refers to the worldwide collection of networks and gateways that use the TCP/IP suite of protocols.
The Internet has become a cultural fixture as a source of both information and entertainment. Many businesses are creating Internet sites as an integral part of their marketing efforts, informing consumers of the products or services offered by the business or providing other information seeking to engender brand loyalty. Many federal, state, and local government agencies are also employing Internet sites for informational purposes, particularly agencies which must interact with virtually all segments of society such as the Internal Revenue Service and secretariats of state. Additionally, providing informational guides and/or searchable databases of online public records may reduce operating costs. Further, the Internet is becoming increasingly popular as a medium for commercial transactions.
Currently, the most commonly employed method of transferring data over the Internet is to employ the World Wide Web environment, also called simply “the Web”. Other Internet protocols exist for transferring information, such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Gopher, but have not achieved the popularity of the Web. In a Web environment, servers and clients effect data transaction using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), a commonly-known protocol for handling the transfer of various data files (e.g., text, still graphic images, audio, motion video, etc.).
Websites are hosted on server data processing systems. Often more than one server data processing system supports transactions or requests directed to a single website. In other words, for a particular URL to a given website, more than one server data processing system is available to handle requests from users on the Web. These server data processing systems are often organized onto a grouping referred to as a cluster or server cluster. A cluster is a group of server data processing systems that provides fault tolerance and/or load balancing. If one server data processing system in the cluster fails, one or more additional server data processing systems are still available. Load balancing distributes the workload over multiple data processing system in the cluster.
These server data processing systems run applications used to handle requests. For example, the applications for a website may include applications used to provide information about goods and services, provide a shopping cart, and process orders. In order to facilitate multi-server transactions that involve data transfer between systems over a network, it is necessary to maintain a database of correct addresses for other systems located on a network. Such a database is called a name space. In the prior art, adequate solutions do not exist for the problem of maintaining usable ‘federated’ naming context references, which are naming context references linked to addresses on foreign systems. A federated name space is a name space employing such references. For example, if a first name space on a first system has a federated naming context binding which resolves to a naming context in a second name space, that reference might become invalid if the name server which hosts the second name space is restarted.
What is needed is a method for maintaining federated name context bindings in a name space.